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Authors: Marge Piercy

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Moon Is Always Female

BOOK: Moon Is Always Female
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ALSO BY MARGE PIERCY
      Poetry
Colors Passing Through Us
The Art of Blessing the Day
Early Grrrl
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
Mars and Her Children
Available Light
My Mother’s Body
Stone, Paper, Knife
Circles on the Water
The Moon Is Always Female
The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing
Living in the Open
To Be of Use
4-Telling
(with Robert Hershon
,
   
Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie)
Hard Loving
Breaking Camp
      Novels
Storm Tide
(with Ira Wood)
City of Darkness, City of Light
The Longings of Women
He, She and It
Summer People
Gone to Soldiers
Fly Away Home
Braided Lives
Vida
The High Cost of Living
Woman on the Edge of Time
Small Changes
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
Going Down Fast
      Other
Sleeping with Cats, A Memoir
So You Want to Write: How to
      Master the Craft of Writing
      Fiction and the Personal
      Narrative
(with Ira Wood)
The Last White Class: A Play
(with Ira Wood)
Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt:
      Essays
Early Ripening: American Women’s
      Poetry Now: An Anthology
The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of
      Days
(with paintings by Nell Blaine)

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Brush and ink drawing of cat from “Studies of Flowers and Animals” by Shen Chou, 1494, Ming Dynasty. Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, the Republic of China.

Copyright © 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980 by Marge Piercy

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and, simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry/
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following periodicals, where most of these poems previously appeared:

The Ark
,
Aspect
,
Blue Buildings
,
Cedar Rock
,
Chrysalis
,
Croton Review
,
Gallimaufry
,
The Guardian
,
Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review
,
Hard Pressed
,
Hudson River Anthology
,
Lady Unique
,
The Little Magazine
,
The Lunar Calendar
,
Mississippi Mud
,
Moon Dance
,
Mosaic
,
Mother Jones
,
National Forum
,
Open Places
,
Paintbrush
,
Painted Bridge Quarterly
,
Poetry Now
,
Poets On
,
Pulp
,
Pushcart Press
,
Real Paper
,
Shankpainter
,
Sister Courage
,
Sojourner
,
The Spirit That Moves Us
,
Tendril
,
The Thirteenth Moon
,
Transatlantic Review
,
waves
,
Woman Poet
.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Piercy, Marge.    The moon is always female.    I.    Title.
PS3566.I4M6    811′.5′4    79-21866

eISBN: 978-0-307-76134-7

v3.1

For Woody

     Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

HAND GAMES

The inside chance

When a friend dies

Night flight

Arriving

Excursions, incursions

Dirty poem

Leonard Avenue

Limited but fertile possibilities are offered by this
brochure

Intruding

The damn cast

The wrong anger

The cast off

Waiting outside

Will we work together?

In memoriam Walter and Lillian Lowenfels

Under red Aries

The ordinary gauntlet

The long death

A battle of wills disguised

Intimacy

To have without holding

My mother’s novel

The low road

What it costs

Season of hard wind

Hand games

The doughty oaks

Armed combat in a café

Poetry festival lover

Complaint of the exhausted author

For strong women

Apologies

The fisherman’s catalogue

Rainy 4th

Neurotic in July

Attack of the squash people

The inquisition

Arofa

Cho-Cho

Cats like angels

A new constellation

Indian pipe

September afternoon at four o’clock

Morning athletes

The purge

Argiope

From the tool and die shop

For the young who want to

Memo

THE LUNAR CYCLE

The moon is always female

SAILLE: Right to life

UATH: May apple

DUIR: Shadows of the burning

TINNE: The sabbath of mutual respect

COLL: Tumbling and with tangled mane

MUIN: Cutting the grapes free

GORT: The perpetual migration

NGETAL: The great horned owl

RUIS: The longest night

BETH: At the well

LUIS: White on black

NION: Another country

FEARN: Crescent moon like a canoe

O!

HAND GAMES

     The inside chance

Dance like a jackrabbit

in the dunegrass, dance

not for release, no

the ice holds hard but

for the promise. Yesterday

the chickadees sang
fever
,

fever
, the mating song.

You can still cross ponds

leaving tracks in the snow

over the sleeping fish

but in the marsh the red

maples look red

again, their buds swelling.

Just one week ago a blizzard

roared for two days.

Ice weeps in the road.

Yet spring hides

in the snow. On the south

wall of the house

the first sharp crown

of crocus sticks out.

Spring lurks inside the hard

casing, and the bud

begins to crack. What seems

dead pares its hunger

sharp and stirs groaning.

If we have not stopped

wanting in the long dark,

we will grasp our desires

soon by the nape.

Inside the fallen brown

apple the seed is alive.

Freeze and thaw, freeze

and thaw, the sap leaps

in the maple under the bark

and although they have

pronounced us dead, we

rise again invisibly,

we rise and the sun sings

in us sweet and smoky

as the blood of the maple

that will open its leaves

like thousands of waving hands.

     When a friend dies

When a friend dies

the salmon run no fatter.

The wheat harvest will feed no more bellies.

Nothing is won by endurance

but endurance.

A hunger sucks at the mind

for gone color after the last bronze

chrysanthemum is withered by frost.

A hunger drains the day,

a homely sore gap

after a tooth is pulled,

a red giant gone nova,

an empty place in the sky

sliding down the arch

after Orion in night as wide

as a sleepless staring eye.

When pain and fatigue wrestle

fatigue wins. The eye shuts.

Then the pain rises again at dawn.

At first you can stare at it.

Then it blinds you.

     Night flight

Vol de nuit: It’s that French

phrase comes to me out of a dead

era, a closet where the bones of pets

and dried jellyfish are stored. Dreams

of a twenty-year-old are salty water

and the residual stickiness of berry jam

but they have the power to paralyze

a swimmer out beyond her depth and strength.

Memory’s a minefield.

Saint Exupéry was a favorite of my French

former husband. Every love has its

season, its cultural artifacts, shreds

of popular song like a billboard

peeling in strips to the faces behind,

endearments and scents, patchouli,

musk, cabbage, vanilla, male cat, smoked

herring. Yet I call this cobalt and crystal

outing, vol de nuit.

Alone in a row on the half empty late

plane I sit by the window holding myself.

As the engines roar and the plane quivers

and then bursts forward I am tensed

and tuned for the high arc of flight

between snowfields, frozen lakes and the cold

distant fires of the clustered stars. Below

the lights of cities burn like fallen galaxies,

ordered, radial, pulsing.

Sometimes hurtling down a highway through

the narrow cone of headlights I feel

moments of exaltation, but my night

vision is poor. I pretend at control

as I drive, nervously edging that knowledge

I am not really managing. I am in the hands

BOOK: Moon Is Always Female
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ads

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